


Snap, Snap

by Shayvaalski



Category: Sherlock (TV), The Addams Family (Movies)
Genre: Canon-Typical Behavior, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossover, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Gen, Jim Moriarty Dies, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-02-22
Packaged: 2019-11-03 15:17:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17880209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shayvaalski/pseuds/Shayvaalski
Summary: He's not a disappointment. He's just not an Addams.





	Snap, Snap

**Author's Note:**

  * For [atrickstertype](https://archiveofourown.org/users/atrickstertype/gifts).



Sebastian Moran is born an Addams, but it doesn't stick. He has two sisters; Augusta is half a foot taller than him, all muscle and tightly-braided hair, taking after their British emigre grandmother, who was a strongwoman in the circus before she settled down, and Lise is the very picture of their homebred granddaddy, full-lipped and slender and many-fingered like any good witch. Their parents, of course, love all their children; but middle-brother Seb has no one's eyes. 

 They do their best. He isn't, exactly, normal by the standards of their neighbors; but neither is he normal by the standard of an Addams. When his mother stretches a crossbow between his hands for the first time and puts her cheek next to his to help him aim, he hits baby-girl Lise's favorite doll square between her eyes with evident pleasure, but he never touches a bow again. When his father takes him to a cousin's menagerie, he's interested enough in cockatrice and manticore, strokes the centaur in its stall, but it's the tiger he can't take his eyes off. Ordinary and striped and sleeping in the sun. Just like any child. 

He's not a disappointment. He's just not an  _Addams_. 

Even so: they are his family and so they try. When he's younger, they try to bring out what they know must be somewhere in him -- the twist at the root, the blood in the vein, his mother's skin and his father's hands -- but once Seb gets older they try to see him as he is. They make sure he has his own room; they make sure that room has a window that lets sunlight stream in bright and unfiltered. It never looks like his schoolmates (Seb is still his family's son; he prefers his walls gray and his linens dark, and the pet cat who sleeps on his pillow is twice the size of anyone else's, with more teeth) but the books on his shelves are the books of any boy. Jack London. Rudyard Kipling. Adventure stories. Comic books. He wears a teeshirt to school, and jeans. 

They love him anyway. Love's complex and dark and Addams to the core, and Seb loves them back, without reservation. He spots Augusta while she lifts first his body weight, then hers. He holds the cats-cradle braced for Lise to work her knotted spells. But he feels their gentleness with him; feels the way they do not push too hard. 

It's not fair. Seb might not be much else but he is an oak tree in his sisters' breeze, and he wants to feel them strike fierce against him, the way they do against each other. By the time he's twelve he knows his life lies somewhere else, beneath some other storm. 

Eventually -- and he comes to regret this, later, alone on his belly up a tree, and a little later still, less alone and pouring blood -- Seb Addams runs away. 

Or not away, he tells himself the night he leaves. Towards. 

 

\--

 

And after the sixth accidental family reunion (this one in India, while he is healing, with a delighted snake charmer -- his mother's sister's cousin -- and her entire household) he changes his name. Any Addams worth their salt has middle names galore, more than you could shake a stick at, names of relatives dead or supposed so; Seb is called  _Baagh,_ is called  _Sohit,_ is called  _Ó Móráin_.  He's already on his third life (maybe his forth, given the unlikely Addamsish luck he's just had, snapping a she-tiger's neck with his bare hands) so he's past due to change his name. He's been a youth and a solider and now he's head of a household of one, and maybe he didn't give each the full twenty years but he thinks he deserves a clean break with what he's been before. 

Not so clean that he doesn't do it the easy way, of course. He has Seb Addams killed right there in the forest, doing the work from what wasn't quite his deathbed, and thinks of a new man to be -- a man with his mother's aim, his father's way with animals, his older sister's strength, his younger's cleverness, but a man who is not an Addams. 

All he does is pick a name. The rest is handled by someone overseas, an email address gleaned from the dark web, not even an alias except for a letter, documents delivered in a noisy market in the middle of the day by a kid no older than ten, passport and birth certificate and license and bills going back years and a credit card and a speeding ticket and a degree from Oxford and discharge forms, honorable this time, and a slip of paper marked  _M._ The passport is British. He was born in Puducherry. His father was a diplomat, his mother a Brahmin, and he has no sisters to speak of. 

Seb Addams was raised to see signs in everything, and so he keeps the little slip of paper as a talisman and a confirmation, and leaves for London as Moran, Sebastian. Basher to his friends. 

He takes the tiger skin, and leaves an empty grave. 

 

\--

 

England is blissfully free of family, at least as long as he steers clear of the seat in the Dales. Which he does. There's no reason to go up North -- there's not even any reason to leave London, a city almost entirely foreign to him, nothing like upstate New York or the roaring streets of Delhi. It's perfect. He finds a flat barely big enough to fit him, finds a job with a private security firm he doesn't actively hate, and enjoys -- for a while -- being a Moran. Moran gets drinks sent to his table by women out on hen nights, and none of them have third eyes that open at midnight on the solstice; Moran picks up men without familiars trailing at their heels, shadow-shaped and inquisitive. Moran gets to go home to a kitchen painted yellow, with all the pots silver-new and all the plants at peace. Nothing  _ever_  tries to bite him. Nothing is ever out of place. When eventually he starts to write about the Forestry Service, he leaves out the cousin and her many-handed daughters, focusing instead on the gods of the Sundarban, the tigers, and how he tracked them through the jungle. 

His scars heal clean, if deep. 

It's almost a year before he becomes  _dangerously_ bored. Moran, he decides one night in a pub, is a man who causes a little bit of trouble, raises a little bit of hell. Sure, he didn't get kicked out of the Army, but maybe he would have, given a little more time and another tour. Maybe it's time to make London his own instead of just living there, another face in the crowd. Moran can be a name folk know too. 

(He doesn't think of the whole county knowing another man's family by sight. He is not that man now.) 

He's three whiskeys in and there's no time like the present. If he were Augusta (he has no sisters) he'd break the bar in two; if he were Lise (he knows nobody named Lise) he'd turn the handsome butch bartender into something small and furry. But he's not and he doesn't. 

Instead, he's Sebastian Moran. And Sebastian Moran throws punches.  

 

Weeks later, in a different pub, he's biding his time and picking his moment. This is maybe his fourth night here. Long enough to pick out the biggest asshole from the regulars, not long enough to become a regular himself. A big man, too loud. Big enough to make it a fair fight, Sebastian thinks, and that's  _important;_ he's not sure anyone he shares blood with has been in a fair fight in their lives. He starts to get up. 

The bartender puts a whiskey in front of him. Before Sebastian can object that he didn't  _order_  another whiskey -- he's got a handful inside him, enough to make something feral stretch inside his chest, pressing against his scars -- he feels more than sees a man perch beside him. 

"Hello," the man says. His voice is light, tone over tone, and there's something familiar about it Sebastian can't place; something that gets right down to his bones. "Buy you a drink?"

"Looks like you already did." 

"Mm. Buy me one, then."

Sebastian picks up the shot glass between his thumb and forefingers, pinkie and ring curled against his palm. He examines it, then knocks the liquid back. 

"Sure," he says, and starts to get up, already focused on his target. "But gimme a minute." 

The man turns in his seat, following Sebastian's gaze. "I wouldn't bother," he drawls. "He's too drunk to be any fun, tiger, and I  _know_  you like to have a little fun. Sit. Buy me a drink. Have a little chat." 

_Seb is called Baagh_. He sits. The man is small. He has dark hair and dark eyes, and a mouth that looks soft but it isn't, and the most immaculate clothes Sebastian has ever seen. And he's seen immaculate clothes from any century you care to name, worn like a second skin, so that's saying something. Without a word, he signals to the woman behind the bar, who squints at the little man before reaching for the same whiskey Sebastian had been drinking. 

The tiniest shake of a head stops her. 

"Sloe gin fizz, pet."

"You serious?"

"Hush, Moran, we're talking." He leans his chin on his hand, body an incongruous slouch over the bar, blinking long lashes at the bartender. "You do have sloe gin?"

"Somewhere, sure. Hang on two ticks."

When she turns away the man's attention switches back to Sebastian like a light flicking on. Somewhere between  _have a little chat_  and now Sebastian had placed his accent; probably it was hearing his own Irish name in that impossible mouth. It doesn't do anything to place him, but having a little more information makes Sebastian feel -- secure. 

Less insecure, anyway. 

"I suppose I should have  _expected_  you'd have a temper on you," the man says, and his fingers brush against Sebastian's jawline so quickly they might not have been there. "Silly of me. How are you finding London? 

He jerks back, less offended than startled. "What the fuck?" 

A smile, slow and a little sideways, breaks over the man's face. Beside him now a bright pink drink, which he picks up without breaking eye contact. One demure swallow, throat working, and then he slides it over to Sebastian. 

"Try it," he says. "You'll like it." 

Automatically Sebastian looks down. On top of the glass is a business card, droplets of water scattered out on its surface but not sinking in -- the paper is that finely woven, rich, soft to the fingertips, the ink embossed.

On the card is a single letter. Talisman and confirmation. He looks up. 

"Hello," says M. 

 

\--

 

The rooftop is  _freezing._  Sebastian's wool coat was meant to keep him warm up here, and it did its job admirably for the first hour or two, but he hasn't moved much and bones feel the chill. All the same he stays in position, watching his partner through the scope. Jim at least gets to move around, though right now he's sitting on the building ledge with his back to a sheer drop. It makes Sebastian nervy. He knows Moriarty well enough by now to take a guess at what's going through his head, and he doesn't like it. 

When Moriarty leans back over the open air and shoots a wicked look across the gulf between them, he likes it even less. Jim isn't supposed to know exactly where he is, but it doesn't matter; he makes eye contact through the scope and winks. Sebastian draws in breath through his teeth. 

_You stupid fucker,_  he thinks, and then,  _Where the hell_ is  _he,_ and at last,  _What if someone else is watching_.They'be been here what feels like an eternity - and maybe it's been one. It seems like they've been baiting Holmes forever.  

And then a door slams. He can see Jim's whole body tighten with readiness or rage, and Sebastian scrambles for his phone and dials. A tiny, tinny ringtone echoes in the empty air. 

Holmes enters his scope. It takes everything Sebastian has not to pull the trigger; but he has his orders. The fact he can taste his own hatred bitter on his tongue doesn't, can't, won't matter -- Jim's desire glows like a supernova, making everything else a pale imitation, a firefly at dusk, a half-burnt bulb; it drives him to impossibility. 

The ringtone cuts off. Sebastian can't hear their voices but he can see Jim slide off the ledge. See him pacing, see him gesture. Now he's at the edge again, mouth moving. For the flash of a fraction of an instant, his eyes meet Moran's over the gulf. They are black as night. 

Some deep-down buried family instinct flares in Sebastian's gut. When Holmes locks his hands into the smaller man's collar Seb is already halfway to his feet, and by the time Jim is nearly dangling over the edge, arms spread like Christ on the cross, he's up on the low parapet at his full height. There's nothing to do. He cannot fly. 

Seconds later Moriarty is back on solid ground and so is Sebastian. Only the fact that he needs to be able to see what's happening keeps his hands steady on the stock, keeps his breath in his lungs. 

"Goddamn," he whispers. "Come on. C'mon, Jimmy. Make him." 

When the shot cracks against the air he doesn't understand. Not at first. Not until Sherlock flings himself out and down. 

By the time he gets to the other rooftop Jim is gone. It was a strange shot, Sebastian thinks, clinical and horrified as he turns the body over. Not through his brain but instead angled down, aiming almost for his own neck and throat. Not that it made any difference; the back of his coat and the knees of Sebastian's trousers are both soaked with blood. He'd lost enough to kill anyone. 

Staying here will be no use and some danger -- and there's things to be done at home, procedures to be followed. Seb sniffs, rubs his chilled and running nose, and stands up. Leaving Jim here feels  _bad_ , but he doesn't have another solution. 

And then it hits him, like a thunderbolt, and Sebastian almost drops his phone in his haste to get it out and dial. He holds his breath, waits for it to ring. The tone is strange, foreign now after half a lifetime away.

"Lise," he says when she picks up. "Lise, thank God. Can you still raise the dead?"

 

\--

 

Being home gives Seb something like vertigo. His sisters take Jim's body from him and vanish, leaving him standing on the tarmac of the tiny private upstate-New York airport. Within fifteen minutes of explaining himself to Lise a pair of huge, identical men appeared on the rooftop with everything necessarily to remove a corpse from a hospital, including a change of clothes for both the body and Sebastian, and an hour after that, they were in the air. As if by magic, there's a pile of his luggage in the hold. Moriarty had been dazzling in his ability to fix any situation just the way he liked it; but Sebastian had forgotten that an Addams, somewhere, had seen it all before. They were no strangers to fleeing the country undercover; they were well-acquainted with the angry mob. 

("Just you sit tight," the captain told Sebastian, fitting her headset over a loose horsetail of dozing snakes. "I dated your mom back in the dark ages.  _Nice_  girl. We'll get you back to her quick as we can.")

Mother and Father swooped him up from the runway; they put him in a car and drove him home. Nothing was said about twenty years worth of absence; instead when they pull into the drive his father leans into the backseat and shakes him awake, gently, then hands him a front door key.  _S.A._ is scratched into it; the same key Seb left behind the night he ran. 

"I made up your room," he says in his Louisiana drawl, achingly familiar. "There's a storm coming tonight. Get some sleep, shè. Plenty of time to talk after your sister does her work."

"Thanks," says Seb, blurred with exhaustion and grief. "Amm -- Per. I'm sorry -- " 

"Later," his mother says, as gentle as his father's hand. And Seb lets himself be led, up creaking stairs and past secret passages, into his gray little room with a bed he can barely fold himself into, over which the tigerskin has already been spread. The oversized cat that climbs stiffly in with him a few minutes later has a gray muzzle full of teeth. 

"Hi," he whispers to her. She gives him the look of all cats. 

It reminds him -- terribly -- of Jim.

 

When he wakes up it's to the fading warmth of cat-shaped hollow and Lise sitting on the foot of his bed.

"All your clothes are too nice for this," she says, and hands him a stack of clothing. "These are Aggie's. Seb, where have you  _been?"_

"Can we wait on the interrogation?"

She punches his calf. Lise is a grown-up woman now, but they might as well still be sixteen and twelve. All being older means is that it hurts a lot more.

"Ow. Canada. India. All over the place. Let me up."

Obligingly, she slides off the bed. "Who is he?" 

Before answering, Sebastian puts his feet on the floor and sorts through the clothes. They're too big, but not by much. He starts to pull off yesterdays' shirt. 

"My partner," he says through the fabric, which is easier than to her face.  

"Shit, Seb." Her tone isn't surprised, but there's sympathy in it. "I'm sorry. You married?"

"No. It's complicated." Seb glances at her as he reaches for a clean shirt, at her hands. It's hard to tell, but -- "Are you?"

"Engaged." She wiggles too many fingers at him. "I'll introduce you once we get this done."

"Okay." Augusta's sweater is only a little long in the arms, but it falls past his hips. The heavy canvas pants look more or less right. "Close your eyes. So it  _will_  get done?" 

"Yeah. I mean -- " He sits back down on the bed. Lise has her knees up now, arms wrapped around them as she waits, looking young and boneless. Seb feels a  _lot_  more than four years older. "It should. I don't know if you want to hear this but I patched him together pretty well; should heal okay once he's back inside."

"He bled out."

"I noticed. Don't worry. Uncle Vlad came by while you were asleep; all we need's a heartbeat and a spirit. What's his name?"

"James Moriarty. Jim." 

"Cool. You all set?"

"Almost." He jams his feet into boots that still have blood in the treads. "Yeah."

"Then let's go wake up James."

 

Seb expects the basement but gets the attic.

"I needed the lightening pole," Lise explains, and positions him carefully in the center of the room next to a covered table before drawing a circle around him in chalk. "It's a science too, not just an art. Don't touch him yet. Okay." She stands up. When she reaches for the sheet Seb braces himself, but it's not as bad as he expects. Jim looks dead, yes, but he doesn't look shattered. The IV helps, and so does the wiring around chest and skull; it adds a sense that the way he is now is only transitory. 

Outside rain whips the house. 

"Okay. You can touch him now. One hand." Lise walks briskly around the circle counterclockwise, then kneels at her starting point in front of three bowls. One is full of water, one milk, the last a dark liquid that looks like old blood. "He didn't bleed out all the way," she says, "so we get to take some shortcuts." Carefully she dips a finger in each, then draws her dripping fingertips over the line of the circle. "There's an opening for him to come back now. Call him."

"How?"

"Up to you, Seb, he's your boyfriend." Lise rocks back on her heels, then all the way to her feet. "But let me get over to the switch first." 

'The switch' is a big two-handed lever mounted on the wall, as old as the house, with cables running up to the lightning rob and snaking along the ground to the table, where they shrink to wires and curl around Jim. Seb has never been in an Addams attic without one. He's never used it for real, but Lise reaches up without hesitation and wraps her palms around the ancient wood, bracing herself. "Ready?"

"Aren't I gonna get shocked, touching him?"

"No." She sniffs at the air, mouth open to taste better; looking for ozone. "I'll be directing it. Steady now; ten seconds." 

The hair on the back of Seb's neck stands straight up. Without thinking about it too much he puts one big dark hand at the base of Jim's throat, fingers spread over his collarbone, as if he could anchor him there somehow. 

"Hey," he says, soft. "Boss. Get your ass back here." 

Lise drags the lever down a fraction of a second before the attic goes brilliant-white. Right above them is a crack of thunder loud as a gun; Seb flinches hard but doesn't move; they are beneath and inside the storm. Underneath his palm he can feel electricity pulse without ever touching him, shivering through the body as his sister throws her hands up, silent and illuminated. Whatever she's doing he feels that too, as shadows fall away from her slim form and lightening streams through her fingers. 

Jim gasps. Gasps and chokes and scrabbles at Seb's hand, at his wrist, at the wires and the IV. Instantly Lise slams the lever back into position; the lights come back on and the storm is just a storm again. Moriarty still writhes. 

"Give it a minute, James, you've been through hell and you're not out yet." Lise releases the stop on the transfusion bag, waits for the blood to begin to flow. Huge dark eyes ringed with white bore into Sebastian's. His breath is ragged but it's there, heaving into and out of a thin pale chest that Lise is stripping methodically of wires. For a moment she vanishes; and then she's back, the bowl of milk cradled in both hands. There's a swirl of red in the center, perfect and horrible. Moriarty struggles to sit and Seb helps him awkwardly, catching a glimpse of the neatly-mended but unhealed wound in Jim's neck before he looks away.

"Drink this," she says, and Jim holds out his hands. One is tinged with color; the other white as milk. 

 

\--

 

"How did you know it would  _work?"_  

Lying on child-Seb's favorite couch with his hands below his head, Jim cracks an eye. He's still bruised-looking around the eye-sockets, voice hoarse and bones delicate even for him. Above him, leaning over the back of the sofa, Sebastian frowns. Lise had warned him it would take time for the spirit to settle and the body to heal, and he trusts her. But he wants answers now _._

Jim's silence lasts a long time. Then he reaches between the couch cushions and pulls out a book Seb knows from his childhood but never really read.  _Family Values,_  the cover says in embossed Gothic gold _._ A kind of genealogy, hand-illustrated, annotated and up to date, pages constantly added at the end and the book rebound. There's one in every household. Moriarty flips it open, flicks through the chapters, and then turns it so Seb can see. 

"Because, tiger," he says as Sebastian leans forward in disbelief, "you're not the only Addams in the room." 

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Bard, a prompt that got out of hand. If I sat around for a title that wasn't ludicrous it wasn't going to get posted, so. Dah nah nah. Snap snap.


End file.
